Courageous Footsteps Book Review
By
By
Beth Virtanen, PhD, Finlandia University and Founder of the Finnish North American Literature Association
Diane Dettmann has created a heart-wrenching
masterpiece in her latest work, Courageous Footsteps: A WWII Novel. In it, she
tackles the topics of inequity, bigotry, and intolerance in an unemotional
manner which allows the hard truths that underpinned (and perhaps still do)
American culture to come to the fore for examination in this her latest work.
The novel shares the story of a middle-class
Japanese-American family made up of a teenaged girl Yasu, her brother Haro, and
their shopkeeper parents as the country is swept up in the anti-Japanese
hysteria following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The primary narration is
through the eyes of Yasu, the high-school girl whose future is upended
The Japanese-American family strives to preserve some
dignity while they suffer the loss of nearly all they possess—their means of
livelihood, their possessions, their home, their security, and almost their
dignity. In this dark tale, life goes from bad to worse in terms of living
conditions and prospects for the future, especially when Haro is drafted to
serve on the European front and leaves young Yasu with her parents in the
detention camp.
In a nearly absurd parallel, Yasu’s high school
friend, a white, middle-class girl, completes the plans that both girls had set
before themselves of going to college and seeking their individual success. The
letters shared between the two serve to highlight in stark contrast their
prospects, which at the opening of the story had been identical. One girl is
detained and forced into manual labor in the detention camp while the other
completes high school and is accepted at Berkeley.
The maddening and relentless progression of the story
is unavoidable, and readers resists at every turn what we know is coming, until
there is a surprising and ambiguous turn of events that allows for Yasu’s
accidental shift in fate that suggests a slightly more hopeful, but clearly
uncertain, future. Yasu’s opportunity, we know, is not to some utopian ideal.
It is, at best, a transition to a new kind of struggle, but perhaps one that
holds somewhat less pessimism than what is located in the detention camp.
This novel is sensitively written, incorporating a
complex narrative structure that shifts in perspective among the principle
characters. Although told predominantly from Yasu’s point of view, the passages
from the other perspectives allow for a richer narrative experience and a
greater understanding of the central issues at play that created the diverse
outcomes for members at various locations within the social and ethnic
hierarchy of the day. While written for and receiving honors as young-adult
fiction, this work is suitable for a general audience as well.
Dettmann is author of Twenty-Eight Snow Angels: A
Widow’s Story of Love, Loss and Renewal and co-author of Miriam: Daughter of
Immigrants. This latest novel, building on the two earlier and well-received
works, embodies her greatest achievement to date.
Dettmann, Diane. (2015). Courageous Footsteps: A WWII Novel. Denver, CO: Outskirts Press. ISBN: 978-4787-5558-6 Available in various independent bookstores and on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/author/dianedettman
View book trailer at http://youtube.com/watch?v=WbiacBYmws4
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